XMPP clients are fine albeit it all, as many as they are, slightly different as is the nature of the protocol. This just means there is value in contributing to existing clients, creating new clients, or embracing progressive enhancement (which most do for example with emoji reactions just being a quoted text reply & so on) & complete feature parity is a fool’s errand if you want an exensible protocol with diversity & experimentation in the community. With the broad exception of the Conversations Compliance, there isn’t a flagship client & instead the best ideas come to the most used or most innovative clients. I use Cheogram, Profanity, Gajim, Dino, Movim at different times (& would love to create my own). The protocol is stable, healthy, & ready for proposals for improvement.
If I compare this to the more-expensive-by-all-metrics-to-run Matrix, if it ain’t Element, you gotta problem since a vast majority of users are on it & using all of its features & no other client has anything near parity but are expected to have parity instead of allowing things to sometimes be gracefully missed or shown in a less than ideal manner as acceptable. This hurts experimentation. Good luck trying anything similar to GDPR when all nodes are design & required to duplicate all messages & attachments for all users to every server anyone in it comes from.
The only real gotcha is the same gotcha as Matrix when using multiple clients with double-ratchet encryption (ala Signal) is that clients will expire keys that haven’t been seen in a while & is hard to get both devices retrusting one another. Turning it off & on again rarely works & requires fiddling on both ends sometimes. I really should just use PGP for encryption more often…
Wild. I used sway for the first time with Nix since I could rollback a misconfiguration.